This is from a post from my other blog Rhythmlabonline.com. Grab some free and great music from Scion and Daptone records:

One of the top labels of the year, Daptone Records just dropped a cd of remixes with a little help from Scion (damn Scion is doing some cool stuff, makes me wanna go buy a car from them). Just in time for the holidays, you can grab them all for free. You heard right FREE! There are some great remixes. Click here for a direct link for the download.

I missed the days of creating mixtapes for friends back in the day. I use to make mix cds, but it was a little inconvenient to share with somebody in another state or country especially with out the instant reaction. This is where Mixaloo comes in. I found about this site from Springwise.

With Mixaloo, you can create your own mix from over 3 Million Songs. Then you can share your mix on your myspace, facebook, blog, or any other website. Here is the kicker. You can make money from your mix. If people purchase the songs off of your mix, you get some money. The money would be sent to a paypal account. If you don’t have a paypal account, you will need to set up one. The only problem right now is that the songs are only 30 second preview (which sucks), but they are apparently working on full tracks. Give it a try. It is a cheap gift to give for the holidays and you could make some money to boot.

The book is a collection of stories, essays, art, and other contributions by various artists, musicians, and writers. It centers around the role of the mix tape and cassette culture in the lives of the contributors, which stands as a testimony to the importance of the medium starting in the late 1970’s to its relevance today. Here tapes are used mostly to confess love or admiration, or to expose an acquaintance to new and underground music. (From Wikipedia)

RIAA is now threating the funding of colleges and universities. If suing single moms for sharing 24 songs, or little girls wasn’t enough, the RIAA and its lobbyists are trying to force colleges and universities to fight piracy and if they don’t, they risk losing funding. So your hard earn tuition will go to resources to see if you are sharing the new Britney Spears album instead of education. RIAA is so desparate they are doing everything except evolving the business model.

University officials have been understandably alarmed, as the above provisions would put a potential $100 billion each year in federal aid at risk; failure to comply would cause the school to lose all of its financial aid for students, affecting even those students who don’t own a personal computer.

In a letter written on Wednesday and signed by the presidents of Stanford University and Penn State, and the chancellor of the University of Maryland system, university officials wrote:

Such an extraordinarily inappropriate and punitive outcome would result in all students on that campus losing their federal financial aid–including Pell grants and student loans that are essential to their ability to attend college, advance their education, and acquire the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century economy … lower-income students, those most in need of federal financial aid, would be harmed most under the entertainment industry’s proposal.

If there’s a better place to share music than a university, I haven’t heard about it. They offer students broadband connections, of course, and with so many peers around students must always have plenty ideas about the latest songs to download.

But even without the broadband connections, universities would still be near-ideal places to share music. The so-called sneakernet allows students to dump the contents of their iPods onto each others’ computers. Or, you can fit about 1400 MP3s onto a single 4.7GB DVD-R disc.

That’s why a clause in the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (COAA) makes so little sense. According to the Digital Freedom Campaign (part of the Consumer Electronics Association), the bill’s Campus Based Digital Theft Prevention provision “would require every university receiving federal funds to purchase a subscription to a music download service as a way of preventing unauthorized downloads and file sharing on college campuses.”

Digital Freedom accused the RIAA of having had one of its Congressional lobbying victims insert the clause, which it says would require taxpayers to spend $100 billion earmarked for financial aid on digital music subscriptions.

Here is another artist in my series, “Don’t Sleep On”. His name is Wale and he is a rapper from my old stomping grounds of Washington D.C. I been playing his music on the Rhythm Lab for a while now. I think he is one of the freshest sounding MCs to come out in a long time. He also incorporates the sound of Go-Go into his music.

From Wikipedia:

Go-go is a subgenre of funk which originated in the Washington, D.C. area during the mid- to late-1970s. A handful of bands contributed to the early evolution of the genre, but singer/guitarist Chuck Brown is credited with having developed most of the hallmarks of the style.

He has just appeared on the cover of the latest issue of Urb Magazine along side the French Duo Justice. He is currently working with super producer Mark Ronson (producer behind Amy Winehouse, and Lily Allen). He even opened up this past year’s MTV Video Music Awards. He also has mixtape called 100 Miles and Running available as a free download. I see big things for Wale in 2008. Also check out this article in the Washington Post on Wale.

P.S.: Also check out Tabi Bonney. He is another great DC rapper with a style all of his own.

Looking for an alternative to iTunes. Well give them the ‘bird’. Songbird that is. Songbird is web browser/media library. It has a lot of the features that iTunes has, but it has the ability to “Play the Web”.

Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.

Songbird has been out a while, but it just dropped a new version about a week ago. Thing that makes it better than iTunes is that it’s open source. Basically, that means anyone with the skills can modify the code for their use, create plugins, or even give it whole new look. Thinking, I don’t want to copy all my music from iTunes to some new media player/library. Songbird can import your complete iTunes library with the exception of purchase music from the iTunes store.

The one neat feature of Songbird is the ability to listen and download music from a variety of mp3 blogs. The newest feature of this version is incorporating hypem.com. Hypem.com is site that follows all types of mp3 blogs. You can also purchase music from more than one music store unlike iTunes like insound.

Check out this video to learn more about Songbird and then give it a try. It’s free and works on Macs and Windows PCs

As some of you know, I love my vinyl. I have over 1,500 records. You can’t beat the feel of vinyl. The artwork is amazing. It is much better than those coasters called CD’s. I found a couple of interesting articles over at Wired.com. The first one is entitled “Vinyl May Be Finl Nail in CD’s coffin”. It discussed the rise of vinyl records, while CD’s are on a declined. It was supposed to be the other way around. CD’s were supposed to killed the vinyl record.

As counterintuitive as it may seem in this age of iPods and digital downloads, vinyl — the favorite physical format of indie music collectors and audiophiles — is poised to re-enter the mainstream, or at least become a major tributary….

“I’m hearing from labels and distributors that vinyl is way up,” said Ian Connelly, client relations manager of independent distributor alliance IODA, in an e-mail interview. “And not just the boutique, limited-edition colored vinyl that Jesu/Isis-style fans are hot for right now.”

I am very happy to hear this. The other article is about a new hybrid cd/vinyl product. On one side you can play it in a cd player the other side you place it on a turntable and you can play about 3.5 minutes of music. It was created by Optimal Media Production.

Here is a little review:

As for the overall sound quality, I just finished giving the vinyl side of a Sonic Kollectiv VinylDisc compilation a spin, and it sounded decent — not as good as 180 gram, but certainly good enough to warrant consideration from bands and labels looking to offer something new to their customers: a CD that everyone can play, with a secret bonus track in the grooves on top for those music fans who have record players.

How many of you still have a turntable/record player? Do any of you still buy records? If you don’t own a record player, would you consider it with the news about the vinyl record making a comeback into mainstream?